Tag: Mobile

We are on a big roll right now to put in all the features we added to Clubs back into the Race side. Today we are releasing some improvements to the Donation setup as well as the Custom Questions setup. These are mostly minor, but do include the nice new Mobile design.

We will keep notifying you of updates here, and expect this all to wrap up with some HUGE improvements on the Race Wizard as well as the Registration process runners see over the next month or two.

Enabling online race day registration can improve the operation of your race, and make things better and easier for your runners. This is a complete overview of the process with pointers to more specific resources on each topic.

On the right you will see the major steps to enable Race Day Registration. Here are the links to the specific areas of drill-down:

In addition, we think this should all be done in an open environment. This means that races using other pre-registration systems could use RunSignUp only on race day – importing their existing runners for free. It means that bib assignment can be done outside of RunSignUp. It means that any scoring software can be integrated deeply or trade CSV files. It means that results can be posted to any results display – whether traditional courier font webpages or cutting edge systems like Xacte and Athlinks. And of course never any lock-in with RunSignUp, and no spam or advertising.

We have a Graffiti Run using RunSignUp. We did some analysis and 47% of the people registering are doing so from a mobile device. We see an overall rate of about 29%, so the increased rate is most likely due to the younger demographic than most road races see. (Note you can see the same demographic age breakdown and more in our Graphical Reports for your race)

We thought it would be interesting to capture what people are seeing on their iPhones and Androids. While it is a lot of screens, it does provide a complete experience that is much easier to navigate for a mobile user than a full website. Also, note that RunSignUp auto-detects if the user is on a mobile device and presents the mobile version of registration and has done so for over a year. Watch for upcoming enhancements this summer that should make us an even more obvious choice for races who want to make registration easy for mobile users.

We now have videos to help you use our iPhone Mobile Timer application. See more about the Timer Application, or view the open source code! This is perfect for timing small races and providing real time results to runners – even with txt notifications. Pretty cool. (And a special thanks to Billy Connolly, our iPhone developer who created this awesome mobile app)

You can sign in or record a race offline. After doing so, choose your race/event and move on to the main menu:

Choosing timer shows the timing screen which is used to collect times and places.

You may also use the chute to collect bib numbers and places.

You may manage participants using the “other” button on the main menu:

A glimpse of the add participant screen:

The app will be released on the app store soon! For now, if you wish to try out the application yourself, go ahead and create an account on RunSignUp.com so you can get the most use out of the app. After you do this, make sure to download XCode (only available for Mac OS X), fork the code here on Github, and get build the project.

The most useful code to take a look at is the RSUModel.h and RSUModel.m. This object handles all the interaction between the application and RunSignUp.com. It will internally handle all the credentials specifics, and all subsequent calls to the methods that require an event and raceid will use the ones specified when the user views SelectRaceViewController.

Most of the code files are self explanatory in what their purpose is, but the ones that may not be are as follows: RXMLElement is code borrowed from another Github repository used for reading XML in RSUModel. TimerLabel is a custom UILabel that is seen in the timer screenshot, it handles the actual timekeeping and writing of the formatted time. NumpadView is a custom UIView that is only used on the iPad’s chute and checker views. It replaces the default keyboard due to the need for bigger buttons in a centralized location. RoundedLoadingIndicator and RoundedBarcodeView are two views that function as custom “popups”. RoundedLoadingIndicator displays the RunSignUp animated loading icon.

Currently the Settings view doesn’t do too much. The bigger timing button feature is only taken into account on the iPhone and iPod Touch and Timer Hours is a placeholder for a different setting.

IMPORTANT: The archive view is very important. All timing, checker and chute data is saved locally to the device at each data point, so there is no way to lose all your data aside from deleting the application from the device. In the archive, you may view, edit and even reorder data (chute data only).

We have been working hard on giving race directors and timers the ability to post results and give runners the ability to see their results. We are starting to enter Beta with this, and have a number of features coming such as easy posting of Race Director and RunScore result file, nice looking results display, and an Open API to make it easy for others to integrate with our system.

Today we were having a little hack session and trying out a new Mobile App we have created for the iPhone to do simple timing of an event. Think stopwatch, collecting bib numbers and posting them – except everything is done with an iPhone! We will be testing this live next Tuesday at a race here in South Jersey. If all goes well we will be releasing the application and code (in open source!) shortly afterwards. Exciting stuff!

I come from the Internet Technology business with a lot of focus on open source and the newer Cloud models. This has been a driving force in how we have thought about designing and delivering RunSignUp.

I just re-read an article by a friend of mine on The Open Web. It is a bit geeky for the race director and timer community, but some of the basics are what RunSignUp is built on. In particular:

We’ll shift our focus away from systems of record and toward systems of engagement.

Our business partners will drive us to design web platforms, not just websites.

We’ll give smart mobile devices and apps high priority in our designs — usually with a mobile-first policy.

Obviously the big dog in the online running registration is Active.com. They come from a different era where they drive traffic to their site to make money on registration fees as well as advertising and selling subscriber names.

RunSignUp is designed from the bottom up to live on other websites with our widget technology. As seen above, the Dexter Ann Arbor Half Marathon allows registration right on their website with RunSignUp. We think this is where the running community is – out in thousands of different local races and running clubs. With timers who work in collaboration with their race directors.

We will keep focusing our efforts on this new world of flexibility and freedom. And check how RunSignUp looks from your smartphone to signup for a race – it is pretty cool… (That’s HTML5 we use and technology like Terawurfl to determine if you have an iPhone, Android or iPad). Yep it is a new world and we are here to helpt he running community take advantage of this new wave of technology!